Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

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Do the kind of people who have tech jobs and have side projects really need it to cost nothing to run side projects?

I don't understand this obsession with running projects for "nothing" and contorting software architecture to do so.

$5/mo for a digital ocean droplet or $50/month for a a beefier VPS (or even dedicated hardware if you know where to look[0]) is not much compared to the normal monthly expenditure of people in tech on average.

If it was all for convenience/efficiency that'd be one thing, but learning "google cloud run" teaches you nothing about system maintenance, limits your understanding of the full stack, and encourages a myopic view of development, all so at some point when Google/AWS/Azure raises the temperature of the water in the pot everyone starts wondering "how did running software get so expensive?".

While I tend to agree, I'm the type to have ~3 projects going at a time. I'm pretty young, but I can see myself spinning up a few projects a year. Each project needs a sql database, hosted by google for a few bucks a year, a server per service, a company email per project per person on the project, etc. I can easily see this being $50/month/project. So let's call it $150/month, $1800/year. If you're not making any money, that's a lot of bare minimum over a life time just to play around with. Then if you assume your side project isn't meant to be profit optimizing, you may never make money.

It really isn't a lot, but some people aren't in SF where they make massive profit. In more rural areas in the US, non-senior engineers can make ~$60k-$80k. In non-US roles, that's even lower. I can see this price range being meaningful.

Also, I know you can get cheaper with this, but if your goal is to spin up MVP's ASAP, you don't care to work hard to optimize ever penny out of your infrastructure. This is a nice breakdown, and I'll probably use it for the current project I'm spinning up as a test.

You can do all of that with a $5/month vps assuming you don't get a ton of traffic.

Running side-projects at a loss prevents you from keeping a lot of them around, and might make it harder to decide to create a new one - "I want to do this cool project, but i already spend $X a month in hosting and I don't want to spend more".

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